Walling Off Oscar Wilde’s Tomb From Admirers’ Kisses

Amber Luallen, an American visiting Paris, kissed the glass barrier around Oscar Wilde's tomb at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.Credit
Tomas van Houtryve for The New York Times

PARIS — In his dark comedy of 1893, “A Woman of No Importance,” Oscar Wilde has Mrs. Arbuthnot, a respectable woman with a secret past, remark knowingly: “A kiss may ruin a human life.”

It can also, apparently, ruin the stone blocks of a tomb.

Recently, descendants of Wilde, the Irish dramatist and wit who died here in 1900, decided to have his immense gravestone cleansed of a vast accumulation of lipstick markings from kisses left by admirers, who for years have been defacing, and some say eroding, the memorial in hilly Père Lachaise Cemetery here. But the decision meant not only cleaning the stone, a flying nude angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was inspired by the British Museum’s Assyrian figures, but also erecting a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep ardent admirers at a distance.

Family members and some friendsofWilde have welcomed the step. The writer Merlin Holland, who is Wilde’s grandson, said the message was clear. “We are not saying, ‘Go away,’ but rather, ‘Try to behave sensibly,’ ” he said in a phone interview. “I’m sure there will be criticism,” he added.

Indeed, the criticism was quick in coming. On her blog, “A Love Letter From London,” an architectural historian named Lisa Marie, who blogs under the name Miss Marie, wrote that “the continued devotion of Oscar Wilde’s fans more than 100 years after his death, represented by those lipstick marks, enhanced the impact of Epstein’s bold, modern memorial, making it an even more fitting monument to a great decadent and aesthete.”

A half dozen or so readers replied, all agreeing. “A drooled and kissed over tomb is as much history as the man who’s resting there,” wrote a blogger who calls herself Superheidi. Another, Miss Rosette Brune, wrote, “I am sure that Oscar loves lipstick on his tomb, wherever he is now.” Miss Marie responded in the comments, adding: “I wonder how I would feel about lots of people kissing my ancestors’ graves. I think I’d be chuffed, actually!”

In the late 1990s, the number of visitors to Wilde’s tomb rose appreciably, as it became a place of pilgrimage within the cemetery, where some of Wilde’s closest neighbors are Gertrude Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas, as well as Édith Piaf, the French singer. Farther afield is the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors, another focus of admiring fans.

Mr. Holland said the flood of visitors was unleashed by “a combination of things.” There was “Wilde,” the 1997 film starring Stephen Fry, the centenary of Wilde’s death in 2000, but also an extensive exhibit at the British Library that opened that same year. For years, visitors to Wilde’s tomb had limited themselves to leaving graffiti or little notes or flowers. But then, Mr. Holland said, he felt helpless as the number of pink and red kiss marks accumulated.

“Polite requests were simply ignored. First, a sign I put up was pinched,” said Mr. Holland, 66, whose grandmother — Wilde’s wife — changed the family name to avoid public scorn after Wilde was sent to prison by a London court for the crime of homosexuality.

Wilde left London for Paris in 1897 but never regained the creative impetus that yielded powerful verse and plays like “Lady Windermere’s Fan” and “The Importance of Being Earnest.” He died penniless, of meningitis, at 46 in the Hotel d’Alsace, today just L’Hotel, on the Rue des Beaux-Arts, but not before remarking, with characteristic wit, “I am dying as I have lived — beyond my means.”

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Friends put up the money to buy the plot at Père Lachaise and had him buried there with a monument by the young Epstein, which survived intact until the 1960s when its outsize genitals were smashed off in an act of vandalism. (It is rumored the cemetery director used them as a paperweight.)

Lengthy negotiations with the French authorities and the Irish government led to the tomb’s restoration, which was completed last month. The cost of the work was “perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 euros,” Mr. Holland said, or roughly $55,000 to $67,000, the greater part of it put up by the Irish government, despite its fiscal difficulties, and a lesser amount by the Ireland Fund of France.

The glass wall leaves even supporters of the project with a sense of unease. “We’re not happy, of course, with the partition, with the glass screen,” said Sheila Pratschke, director of the Irish Cultural Institute in Paris, which helped arrange the tomb’s restoration. “But it’s more aesthetically pleasing than I expected,” she said.

It is hard to say how Wilde would have reacted. But out at Père Lachaise on a recent sunny afternoon, Marc Overton and his partner Ray Fluta, who had traveled from San Diego to pay homage to the writer, were relieved to see the glass barrier. “He’s a great hero to me, to people who believe that the life of the mind has real value,” said Mr. Overton, who said he had first visited the grave in 1966 and had been returning almost every year since. He said he was gratified to see “no more disgusting lip marks.”

However, the glass was already spotted with kisses, and flowers and notes were strewn at the tomb’s foot and inside. One paraphrased Wilde: “You taught me that wisdom can come only with winter.”

Another quoted him: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Krzysztof Zembrzycki, 26, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, had come to visit his countryman Frédéric Chopin, who is also buried at Père Lachaise, but dropped by to see Wilde and was put off by the glass wall. “It’s definitely a negative impression,” he said.

Lauren Kunze was even more offended. An ardent admirer of Wilde, she had traveled from London, where she is studying marketing, to visit the tomb with her aunt, Kate King, who was visiting from Boston. Both women were appalled by the glass wall.

“It’s destroying history,” Ms. Kunze said. “I don’t like it.”

“Some people are purists, they want to see things as they were built,” she said. “It’s their experience of history.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 16, 2011, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Walling Off Oscar Wilde’s Tomb From Admirers’ Kisses. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe